N 2007, the National Museum in Warsaw exhibited the part of its collec

Part I  ·  Moving People
W
 
illy Wolff, a student of Dix, member of the ASSO, former anarchist
98
 
and early communist (he joined the KPD/Communist Party of Germany in 
1929
99
) was firm in his belief that there was no alternative to a socialist so-
ciety. Although he did not question the political goal, he did take a critical 
stance on the party and its directives, particularly in regard to the visual arts. 
He found it impossible to acknowledge aesthetic judgments made by an of-
fice; he did not allow himself to be used for politico-cultural purposes; he re-
fused public commissions such as the opportunity in the second half of the 
1960s to paint the foyer of the television tower at Alexanderplatz with pop-
ular motifs.
100
 He followed his own artistic ideas without compromising. As 
happened with many of his colleagues, this gave rise to a prohibition against 
exhibiting; in 1968, for example, an exhibition in the Galerie Kunst unserer  
 
98  A volume of poetry and prose by Erich Mühsam was on his work table; Max Stirner (1806–1856) was one 
of his favorite writers.
99  Liane Burckhardt, “Willy Wolff,” 
Kunstchronik 54:4 (2001): 172.
100  Construction of the television tower began in 1965.
Sigrid Hofer
4
Pop Art in the GDR:  
Willy Wolff’s Dialogue with the West

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Part I  ·  Moving People
Zeit (Gallery for Contemporary Art) in Dresden had to be cancelled shortly 
before the opening on order of the authorities.
101
Over the years Wolff developed a markedly diverse œuvre, outside the 
official art scene, producing drawings with bizarre and surrealistic echoes; 
oils which led, in his confrontation with the work of Poliakoff, to Hard-
edge painting; drawings that can be linked to Naum Gabo; abstract cylinder 
prints; and composite media collages and assemblages made by using banal, 
everyday objects and items he found.
Integrated into the Dresden artists’ circle around the Kupferstich-Kabi-
net (Prints and Drawings Collection), the Kühl art gallery and the collector 
Ursula Baring—all of whom supported nonconforming spirits—Willy Wolff 
was by no means an exception in regard to the diversity of his works in both 
content and form. The artistic climate of Dresden was characterized in par-
ticular by an output of nonconforming pictures, reflected well into the 1970s 
primarily by constructivist and abstract compositions. A discernible counter-
culture developed there, inspired by a lively exchange among artists and by 
the possibility of reaching a limited public through privately organized ex-
hibitions.
Abstract painting, for instance, was part of this counterculture; it emerged 
as an independent development in the East and not as a belated plagiarism of 
the Western avant-garde. Whereas Art Informel was largely based on the ab-
straction of the prewar era and therefore developed at approximately the same 
time in the West and the East, it appears that direct stimulation from the 
West was the source of the version of Pop art found in the East. Willy Wolff 
is still considered the master of Pop art in the GDR as well as its major rep-
resentative.
The following essay explores the question of how themes and stylistic 
means that were genuinely connected to the phenomena of the capitalist eco-
nomic system could find their way into art produced under socialist condi-
tions. At the end of the 1950s, an incursion of representational art had dis-
placed the dominant psychic automatism; with this the reality of mass media 
and mass culture had become the background reflected by Pop art. Where, 
101  See Hans-Ulrich Lehmann, “Symbolische Bedeutung des Sichtbaren,” in 
Willy Wolff zum Hundertsten, ed. 
S. Walther and G. Porstmann (Dresden: Städtische Galerie, Kunstsammlung, 2006), 19. Illustration of the 
invitation poster: 15.
in this context, did Willy Wolff wish to anchor his own notion of reality? In 
pursuit of an answer, the first section of this essay will examine the influence 
of Pop art on Willy Wolff’s work, and the second section will treat Wolff’s re-
sponse to socialist realism.
Willy Wolff owed his knowledge and creative transformation of Pop art 
to two trips abroad at the end of the 1950s—on this point the secondary lit-
erature is in agreement. These trips added to the expressive quality of his rep-
ertoire.
In 1957 Willy Wolff traveled for the first time to London and Derby with 
his wife Annemarie, also an artist who designed tapestries and fabric appli-
qué.
102
 The trip was possible because Annemarie Balden-Wolff, who had em-
igrated in 1933, was an acknowledged victim of fascist persecution. An initial 
request for a trip had been refused by the GDR authorities, but an official in-
vitation from the Communist Party of England to both Wolffs—Annemarie 
was still a member of the party there—was finally granted.
103
It is no longer possible to reconstruct the trip, so we do not know which 
artist colleagues the Wolffs met. In unpublished autobiographical notes, Wil-
ly Wolff reports on numerous visits to the Tate and other galleries in the city, 
without going into details, however.
104
 It would have been too late for him to 
see the exhibit curated by Richard Hamilton in 1956 at the London Whitecha-
pel Art Gallery, “This Is Tomorrow” by the Independent Group,
105
 which her-
alded the beginning of English Pop art and is considered one of the most influ-
ential exhibitions of the 1950s in England; it can be assumed, however, that he 
came across the work of these artists in the galleries. The stimulation provided 
by the first trip must have been profound because the artist couple returned to 
England the following year, remaining again for thirty days.
106
The confrontation with such a different lifestyle
—according to the tenor 
of research—led Wolff to completely new pictorial concepts in the following 
years, although it was not until the mid-1960s that these were to become de-
terminant in his work; the reasons for this will be examined at a later point.
102  Lothar Lang, “Versuch Willy Wolff gerecht zu werden,” in 
Willy Wolff. Malerei, Plastik, Zeichnungen, 
Monotypien (Leipzig: Staatlicher Kunsthandel der DDR, 1980), 7–9.
103  Pan Wolff in a conversation with Sigrid Hofer on 21 September 2009 in Berlin.
104  Manuscript in the Pan Wolff estate, Berlin.
105  Founded by Hamilton and other artists.
106  Pan Wolff in a conversation with Sigrid Hofer on 21 September 2009 in Berlin.

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The first collages in which Wolff used colored paper, illustrations from 
magazines and colored packing materials, as well as fragments of his own 
work as resources for his compositions date from around 1965; he would later 
transform these compositions, some of which were very small, into large-scale 
oil paintings. In an untitled piece from 1965, Willy Wolff combined motifs 
revolving around femininity and eroticism. A bra, stylized breasts—depict-
ed once frontally and then lined up in a series—and a female torso set off by 
tomato-red stockings are arranged on the paper together with fabric samples. 
The artist’s attention was mainly directed to the fabric, which veils and cov-
ers the object but at the same time makes it the focus. The bloom of a red rose 
seems to make it clear that femininity has a positive connotation here.
Femininity and the cult of clothing appear repeatedly in Willy Wolff’s 
work. The collage 
Grünes Ei und Wäsche (Green egg and lingerie), also dating 
from c. 1965, again shows a bra; this time, however, there is an erotic charge 
coming from the model’s corporeality. The dynamic perspective of the almost 
dazzling white underwear and the formal directing of the gaze toward the 
green egg link the two motifs in an ironically ambiguous manner. The han-
dling of the motifs in these collages—the recourse to everyday objects and a 
focus on eroticism in the same way it was used by the advertising industry—
reinforces their proximity to Pop art, as do the intense colors and the renun-
ciation of the artist’s individual hand.
Moreover, works such as 
Ein Bad kann himmlisch/Die Mischbatterie  
(A bath can be heavenly/mixer tap),
107
 or 
Warnung (Warning) also seem to 
be possible only in reference to Pop art. In 
Warnung from 1967, a car tire 
dominates the center of the picture, as if it were raised onto a pedestal. In the 
excerpt-like depiction and the finely detailed execution, the tire is treated like 
a prized object, one that moreover is quite new and without any trace of use. 
The view from below to the hubcap, the stylized depiction of the spokes, the 
reflections in the chrome, and the detailed treatment of the tire tread reveal 
the artist’s graphic perception of the object, which celebrates the banal tire 
like a work of art, like a sculpture.
Roy Lichtenstein, in contrast, filled the picture space with his automo-
bile tires as in an advertisement, concentrating the observer’s attention on 
107 See Dietulf Sander, “Willy Wolff. Ein Bad kann himmlisch sein,” 
Information. Museum der Bildenden 
Künste Leipzig 1 (1982): 4–6.
only the one object. The tire tread, however, was understood as a repeating 
pattern, which in its obvious simplification invoked the paintings of geomet-
ric abstraction.
108
 This play with art history and the ironic commentary on 
the outmoded gestural or intellectual hand of the individual artist, which 
was characteristic of the 1950s, was among the instruments with which Li-
chtenstein and others accompanied their aesthetic upgrading of the world of 
consumption. In 1961 Lichtenstein’s tennis shoes (
Keds) reflected Vasarely’s 
picture 
Mizzar, and with his storm window Andy Warhol had also made ref-
erence to color field painting.
Willy Wolff countered the single motif—the strategy followed by adver-
tising—with a more extensive pictorial narrative. His tire is not detached 
from the context of its use, and the observer’s ability to make associations 
is challenged by the barely introduced form of a bridge, by the green fore-
ground and not least by the title 
Warnung. Nonetheless, in his objective de-
piction Wolff resists any interpretive intent. What kind of warning the tire 
should evoke is undetermined; is it a warning of the basic danger of driving a 
car, is it a warning against ruining the landscape through the continued con-
struction of roads, is it a warning that the automobile fundamentally changes 
the course of life? The mixer tap also remains enigmatic. Although it domi-
nates the surface its existence is strangely unreal. Partly backed by substan-
tial-seeming tiles, partly illuminating from an immaterial space with clouds, 
the tap may be meant as an ironic commentary or, just as likely, as a depic-
tion of an ideal or an illusion. Reading the painting as a reference to shortag-
es in the GDR’s economy, which turned tiles and taps into desirable consum-
er objects,
109
 does not, in my opinion, do justice to the context—but more 
about that later.
Pop art had expanded the concept of art through a rigorous introduction 
of the trivial, together with an emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of the triv-
ial; it had shown that the world of consumption and the mass media not only 
dominated people’s lifestyles but were also able to stimulate the artistic eye to 
108  See K. Varnedoe and A. Gopnik, eds., 
High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (New York: Muse-
um of Modern Art, 1990).
109  See Eugen Blume, “Die späten Bilder von Willy Wolff,” in 
Willy Wolff zum Hundertsten, ed. S. Walther and 
G. Porstmann (Dresden: Städtische Galerie, Kunstsammlung, 2006), 7–12.

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the same degree as the highest achievements of cultural history. Nonetheless, 
Wolff’s stock of motifs for his compositions seems to be based predominant-
ly on personal experiences. The picture of the tap was occasioned by the hous-
ing authority’s decision to replace the fixtures in his building.
The motive behind the painting 
Terese von K. was a hike from Dresden to 
Vienna. Whereas 
Mischbatterie responded to a contemporary event, in Terese 
von K. Wolff treated an episode from his youth. As recorded in his autobio-
graphical notes,
110
 on this hike, which took place before the Second World 
War, he went through the town of Konnersreuth (
K thus stands for Kon-
nersreuth, which is located between the Fichtel Mountains and the Pfälz-
er Forest), an important place of popular piety. Therese Neumann (1898–
1962), who manifested stigmata on Good Fridays in particular, was venerated 
there. Wolff’s receptiveness to mystical accounts of this type may have been 
connected to his spiritual tendencies. There is documentation that he had 
read not only the Ashtavakra Gita, an Indian Sanskrit text which records 
the dialogue of King Janaka with the sage Ashtavakra and treats the path to 
happiness,
111
 but also that he may have known the accounts of Paramahan-
sa Yogananda (an Indian yogi, philosopher and writer), who wrote about his 
visit to Therese Neumann on 16 July 1935 in his 
Autobiography of a Yogi. And 
not least Willy Wolff’s friend Erich Mühsam had memorialized this legend-
ary figure in his poem 
Die Resel von Konnersreuth. Wolff explicitly mentions 
Mühsam’s poetry in his autobiography. Years later Wolff encountered mod-
ern steam-driven machines while hiking, a custom he had retained from his 
Wandervogel days. The many hoses and tubes of these machines had inspired 
him to connect them with his earlier experience, bringing them together ar-
tistically in a bizarre manner.
Linked more to personal impressions than to autobiographical experienc-
es is the painting 
Artistenbein (Sedam) (Acrobat’s leg). In 1968 at documen-
ta 4, Claes Oldenburg had exhibited his two-part synthetic sculpture 
London 
Knees 1966, a play on the length of the new miniskirts. In the course of the 
1960s this skirt, coming from the English fashion industry, had shrunk to the 
format of a wide belt; it heralded the new self-confidence of the emancipat-
ed woman, who had freed herself from social conventions and displayed her 
110  See manuscript in the Pal Wolff estate, Berlin.
111  See manuscript in the Pal Wolff estate, Berlin.
body in a flippant–provocative manner unknown before that time. Leading 
on the one hand to storms of indignation over immoral behavior, on the oth-
er hand it had advanced to a code of behavior for youth culture. Oldenburg 
ennobled this object of social irritation and voyeuristic desire and confront-
ed the observer with things that obviously affected the public more than the 
canonized traditional cultural goods.
Wolff’s work, on the other hand, was based on what was known as the 
Goldener Mann (Golden man) on the tower of Dresden’s city hall.
112
 Ewald 
Redam from Meissen, Saxon’s heavyweight and 
Achtkampf competition 
champion in 1907, and later founder of a variety show, served as a model for 
painters and sculptors at the Dresden Academy of Art, among others. His 
virile stature was also sought when Dresden’s patron saint, Hercules (emp-
tying the cornucopia over the city), was to be erected. The sight of Redam’s 
muscular leg inspired Willy Wolff’s parody, which reduced the heavyweight 
body to the engaged leg and provided him with a fancy boot that played on 
the acrobatics of variety theater. Whereas Oldenburg increased the provo-
cation emanating from his motif by equating the legs as anonymous fetishes 
to desire per se, Wolff did not emphasize the erotic but rather the acrobatic 
moment. What could slip into voyeurism with Oldenburg, Wolff connected 
back to the sphere of artistic entertainment.
113
Tom Wesselmann’s 
Seascape from 1966, with a woman’s leg as the basic 
motif, was also geared toward pure eroticism, to the anticipation of sexuali-
ty; his 
Great American Nude series (ending in 1973) was reduced more and 
more to the presentation of body parts and, according to Roland Barthes, 
came close to the observer’s need to act out his lust for looking without fear. 
Moreover, Wesselmann reported that in these paintings he was seeking met-
aphors for intimate experiences with his friend and later wife, Claire Selley.
114
 
In contrast to these comparable works, for Wolff the erotic moment did not 
play a role; nor was it allowed to claim a place in GDR society. According to 
112  Pan Wolff in a conversation with Sigrid Hofer on 21 September 2009 in Berlin. The commission for the 
Golden Man went to the painter and sculptor Richard Guhr in 1907.
113  For Wesselmann it was also a matter of representing the erotic, of the “new sexual openness” at the begin-
ning of the 1960s. See Marco Livingstone, “Telling It Like It Is,” in 
Tom Wesselmann, 1959–1993, ed. T. 
Buch stiener and O. Letze (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1994), 17.
114  See Livingstone, “Telling It Like It Is,” and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, “The Great American Nude,” in 
Tom 
Wesselmann, 1959–1993, ed. T. Buchstiener and O. Letze (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1994), 226.

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Erich Honecker’s official statements in 1965, “ethics and morals” and “decen-
cy and propriety” are “unshakable standards” to be distinguished from the 
“immorality” of the enemy system.
115
Altogether, Willy Wolff’s erotic motifs are far from the lustful display 
(scopophilia) of the nudes disseminated by the mass media in daily newspa-
pers and journals, to which Pop art responded with conscious ambiguity. In 
contrast to the images spread by the media, Pop art guided the observer’s view 
to individual parts of the body. The entire figure was not the subject of atten-
tion, but rather the seductive eyes, the kissable mouth, the attractive breasts, 
which were all disproportionately enhanced and could have an oppressive ef-
fect. On the other hand, the erotic motifs were withdrawn from the observer 
precisely by means of this pictorial strategy. Captured in two-dimensionali-
ty and stylized into an artificial figure, they surrender any pretence of vitali-
ty and individuality. In addition, the grid on the picture surface underscored 
the artificial character of the body fragments and decidedly countered the 
temptations emanating from them.
It is no accident that in addition to the bra, Willy Wolff treated classical 
sculpture in his work 
Antiker Torso (Antique torso). His artistic view of the 
female body was guided by a long-established ideal of beauty, which made 
reference to the torso on the one hand and to depictions from the Renais-
sance on the other hand. At the same time, he countermanded the reduction 
of femininity to an emanation of sexual appeal because his erotic motifs were 
sanctioned by cultural history, and, as with the bra or in the work 
Allegorisch 
(Allegorical), which altered a female figure by Cranach and confronted her 
with a hammer and sickle, were updated through an ironic twist.
Important differences between Pop art’s intentions and Willy Wolff’s 
work are to be noted not only regarding the choice and understanding of mo-
tifs, but also in the artistic execution. Whereas Pop art used the trivial sub-
ject as provocation and to stimulate critical discussion, it was precisely their 
everyday character that these subjects forfeited under Wolff’s treatment of 
them. Lichtenstein had reflected the techniques of mass media with his dots, 
David Hockney loved the clumsy, nonacademic application of paint, in his 
115  See Wolfgang Engler, “Strafgericht der Moderne. Das 11. Plenum im historischen Rückblick,” in 
Kahlschlag. 
Das 11. Plenum des ZK der SED 1965. Studien und Dokumente., ed. Günter Adge (Berlin: Aufbau Taschen-
buch Verlag, 2000), 19.
assemblages Rauschenberg carried traditional principals of composition ad 
absurdum; in contrast, Wolff opted for meticulous, calculated execution. In 
general, his oil paintings were preceded by collages, which served the prepara-
tion, study and development of his pictorial idea.
116
This is evident, for example, in the fact that the paper materials he used 
were not glued on in their final proportions but rather represented larger sec-
tions that could be shifted around until the formal goal was achieved. These 
“designs” were transferred to oils with only minor changes. Thus, in 
Antiker 
Torso Wolff retained the tear and the fold, which ran vertically through the 
black paper as a design element even when the image was transferred to can-
vas.
117
 In addition, handwritten notes on these designs or “drafts” described 
the gradations of color to be applied, in case the paper used did not corre-
spond with Wolff’s vision. Pencil-drawn grids moreover document the in-
tended process of transfer to a larger format.
118
 Notes on the back, in which 
Willy Wolff recorded the owner of the analogous oil painting, also indicate 
the direct connection between design and execution.
119
The meticulous detailing that generally characterized Wolff’s drawings 
thus turned up again in his artistic input in the collages: he balanced things 
exactly, subtly determined the color fields, and laid down the proportions. 
Skilled manual refinement always remained determinant; an interest in form 
and the process of analyzing the image characterized his entire œuvre. Thus, 
his work never goes after the effect, is never intended for the quick impact, 
even if the color-intense version—before the background of the regulated sale 
of painting materials in the GDR—must have had a particular fascination. 
As the quality of the paper—construction paper, colored foil, packing mate-
rials—shows, these were generally products from the West.
Although a frequent change of style was characteristic of Willy Wolff, 
nonetheless over the years his practices for depicting images were continu-
116  Blume already pointed out that the collages are not to be seen as independent works. Blume, “Die späten 
Bilder von Willy Wolff,” 7.
117  The collage to 
Antiker Torso in the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) Mscr. Dresd. App. 
2717, 52.
118  Compare, for example, the collage 
Toscana in the SLUB Mscr. Dresd. App. 2717, 69.
119  See the collection in the SLUB. All of the collages have a note on the back recording the owner of the rele-
vant work in oil.

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